The use of the anesthetic agents ether and chloroform was first described in the 1840s by American physicians Crawford Long, William Morton, William Edward Clarke and James Simpson, but anesthesia was ...

"Doctor, will you give me Chloroform or Anesthesia?" This is the often-repeated query by many patients about to undergo an operation. Little do they know that chloroform became obsolete decades ago.

Anesthesia was in its infancy when the American Civil War began in 1861. The sheer number of casualties gave surgeons on both sides the opportunity to gain experience with the first two anesthetic ...

Editor's Note: Shauna Devine, Ph.D., is a historian of Civil War and American medicine. She has a Ph.D. in medical history and currently holds a joint appointment as a research fellow at the Schulich ...

Anesthesia works by using medications (anesthetics) to temporarily block pain signals from traveling along your nerves to your brain, or by numbing the brain itself to cause unconsciousness. The ...

The tipping point for anesthesia came on 16 th October 1846, when William T.G. Morton demonstrated the removal of a jaw tumour painlessly with the patient being anaesthetized with 'Ether'. Following ...